‘A Benedictine monastery is like an elephant: hard to define, but you’re in no doubt when you encounter one.’ So said a former abbot of Downside when trying to explain to a group of teenage boys what he had given his life to build. The same could probably be said of a classical school in the United States.
According to Forbes in December last year, the US classical education market, once thought to be a homeschool niche, is now worth a whopping $10 billion. The genesis of the movement lies in evangelical Protestantism. Pastor Doug Wilson founded the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) in 1994. The ACCS was the United States’ first cluster of classical schools, and it remains the largest. However, in the last few years Catholic classical schools have started to boom. A 2024 report by Acadia Education puts Catholic classical schools at 20 per cent of the market. The same report forecasts that by 2035, 2.4 per cent of America’s elementary school children will be attending a classical school.
